Foreign direct investment and the labour market in Vietnam's services sector

The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate, theoretically and empirically, the impacts of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the host labour market. Specific objectives focus on exploring the role of FDI firms in determining wages and the employment of female workers (hereafter referred to as female employment) by domestic firms, using the empirical case of the services sector in Vietnam. While the literature suggests that foreign firms, especially large multinationals, tend to pay higher and employ women more intensively than local firms, there is scant evidence on whether and how FDI firms can influence domestic firms' wages and gendered employment, notably in the context of service industries. This thesis contributes to filling these knowledge gaps from both theoretical and empirical grounds. To realise the research objectives, I constructed two theoretical models to illustrate how the presence of FDI firms can be a determinant of local firms' pay and employment decisions. The first model shows that foreign presence can influence the expected average wage of domestic firms (causing so-called 'wage spillovers') through two contrasting channels, namely productivity spillovers and cut-off capability. The second model shows that FDI firms can affect domestic firms' female employment (measured by female-to-male labour ratio), directly via augmented female productivity spillovers and indirectly via the cut-off effect. The ultimate impact of foreign presence on wage and female employment depend on the relative strength of the two channels. Guided by the theoretical frameworks, I then specified two econometric models to empirically test and estimate the impacts of FDI firms on average wage and female employment of domestic counterparts. The empirical analyses utilise rich panel datasets of firms in Vietnam's services sector over the five-year period 2009-2013, which were extracted from the enterprise survey database of the General Statistics Office (GSO). In the specified models, foreign presence is the variable of interest and measured by the employment share of FDI firms in an industry, region and year. To address the potential endogeneity problem, I utilised the Generalised Method of Moments with Instrumental Variable (IV-GMM) estimation technique. Of this method, I adopted a novel approach to constructing IVs, which capitalises on the geographical and industry segmentation of the local labour market. In the estimation procedure, I conducted a number of diagnostic checking, including the endogeneity test, underidentification and overidentification tests (for the relevance and validity of selected instruments), and accounted for multicollinearity, autocorrelation, and heteroskedasticy problems. The estimation results indicate that FDI firms exert positive and statistically significant impacts on the pay level and female employment of domestic firms in Vietnam's services sector. Specifically, a one per cent increase in foreign presence induces local firms to raise their real wage and female-to-male labour ratio by 1.15 per cent and 2.18 per cent on average, respectively. The findings also suggest that higher paying firms tend to be larger, state owned, more capital intensive, and well established. Additionally, smaller, privately owned, less labour-intensive firms are more likely to hire women at a higher rate. To provide deeper insights into the heterogeneity of FDI-linked impacts, I extended the analysis by examining different layers of disaggregation. Notably, at the two-digit Vietnam SIC level, the scatterplots of the data and the estimation results reveal divergent effects of foreign presence on domestic firms' wages (positive in the high-wage group and negative in the low-wage group), and female employment (positive in the male-intensive group and insignificant in the female-intensive group). Likewise, additional investigations at the three-digit level show heterogeneous FDI impacts, depending on specific characteristics of domestic and foreign firms. While the existence of positive FDI impacts at the overall sector level may imply services FDI attraction as a viable strategy to improve local wages and promote female employment opportunities, the findings of heterogeneous effects warrant a more cautious and selective approach to be adopted by local firms, workers and governments in policy and decision formulation

HOW DO SOCIO-DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS INFLUENCE THE PROBABILITY OF FINANCIAL INCLUSION? EVIDENCE FROM A TRANSITIONAL ECONOMY

Financial inclusion can be understood as the provision of financial services in a convenient and appropriate way to meet the needs of society, help vulnerable groups have opportunities, and promote sustainable economic growth. This study uses a probit regression model with 200 observations collected from November 1 to December 31, 2019, to examine how socio-demographic characteristics influence the probability of financial inclusion in Vietnam. The results show that human capital, education, and living in urban areas increase personal financial inclusion, while age has an inverse relationship with financial inclusion. Based on the analysis results, we recommend some solutions to promote financial inclusion, especially by applying financial technology and supplying more services to Vietnamese people

STAYING CONNECTED IN A DISCONNECTED WORLD: SUPPORTING STUDENTS IN TRANSITION DURING COVID-19

In the current COVID-19 landscape, the shift to online partway through the semester for a large first-year biology unit was disorientating and isolating for many students. Learners were impacted by a myriad of factors including Zoom fatigue, access to quality internet, financial stress and mental health. Throughout the semester, we connected with students about how they felt they were tracking with their studies, support they needed to assist with their learning and their feedback on interventions implemented based on their responses from prior surveys. Consistency and flexibility with teaching approaches were key. Many students relied on keeping to their class timetables and live interaction with instructors to stay motivated, whilst others preferred to catch-up via recordings or online modules in their own time. We also organised regular Question & Answer sessions over Zoom to further facilitate live interactions between students and teachers. It was also challenging for the instructors to grow accustomed to teaching without relying on non-verbal communication cues from students. However, we came across pleasant discoveries from running online classes that we believe would also be useful approaches to implement in in-person classes to enhance engagement with learning in a large and diverse cohort

Robust model predictive kinematic tracking control with terminal region for wheeled robotic systems

This paper addresses the nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) for wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) under external disturbance. The decoupling technique is utilized based on the non-holonomic constraint description for separating the WMR model. This method is able to achieve the under-actuated kinematic sub-system without disturbance and fully-actuated dynamic sub-system in presence of disturbance. Thanks to the decoupling technique, the disturbance is lumped into dynamic sub-system. The novelty lies in that the MPC-based tracking control with fixed initial point guarantees the stability based on a new establishment of terminal region and equivalent terminal controller. The feasibility problem is demonstrated to lead the tracking problem using theoretical analysis. Moreover, the control structure is inserted more the robust nonlinear dynamic controller. The effectiveness and advantages of the proposed control scheme are verified by numerical simulations using Yamip tool

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF SHRIMP CULTURE IN THE MANGROVE AREAS OF VIETNAM

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

Multi parametric model predictive control based on laguerre model for permanent magnet linear synchronous motors

The permanent magnet linear motors are widely used in various industrial applications due to its advantages in comparisons with rotary motors such as mechanical durability and directly creating linear motions without gears or belts. The main difficulties of its control design are that the control performances include the tracking of position and velocity as well as guarantee limitations of the voltage control and its variation. In this work, a cascade control strategy including an inner and an outer loop is applied to synchronous linear motor. Particularly, an offline MPC controller based on MPP method and Laguerre model was proposed for inner loop and the outer controller was designed with the aid of nonlinear damping method. The numerical simulation was implemented to validate performance of the proposed controller under voltage input constraints

The results of deep magnetotelluric sounding for studying the Nha Trang - Tanh Linh fault

The profile of deep magnetotelluric sounding (MT) from Duc Trong - Tuy Phong has been carried out in Lam Dong and Binh Thuan  provinces. The length of the Duc Trong - Tuy Phong profile is about 80 km with 15 stations and the distance between the stations measures about 5 km. Two-dimensional MT inversion was used to find a resistivity model that fits the data. The 2D resistivity model allows determining position and development formation of the Nha Trang - Tanh Linh  fault. This is the deep fault, which is showed by the boundaries of remarkable change of resistivity. In the near surface of the Earth (from ground to the depth of 6 km), the angle of inclination of this fault is about 60o; in the next part, the direction of the Nha Trang - Tanh Linh  faut is vertical. Geoelectrical section of the Nha Trang - Tanh Linh  profile shows that the resistivity of mid-crust is higher than that of lower-crust and of upper-crust

Exploiting secure performance of full-duplex decode and forward in optimal relay selection networks

In the presence of an illegitimate user, we investigate the secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the optimal relay selection (ORS) networks by applying decode-and-forward (DnF) based full-duplex (FD) relaying mode. The closed-form expressions for the allocations of the end-to-end signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) in each wireless network are derived as well as the closed-form expression for the exact SOP of the proposed ORS system is presented under Rayleigh fading schemes. As an important achievement, SOP is also compared between orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes. Our results reveal that the SOP of the suggested scheme can be considerably influenced by several parameters involved, including the number of relays, the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of eavesdropper links, transmit power and the average residual self-interference (SI) enforced on the FD relays.Web of Science244767

How does FDI affect domestic firms' wages? theory and evidence from Vietnam

This paper explores the role of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) as a determinant of domestic firms' wages, namely wage spillovers. We first construct a theoretical model to demonstrate that the presence of FDI firms affects domestic firms' expected average wages via productivity spillovers and a cut-off capability. We then estimate FDI-induced wage spillovers by employing IV-GMM estimator with a five-year panel dataset of a growing service industry in Vietnam. Despite FDI firms on average pay 2.25 times that of domestic firms, they put a downward pressure on domestic firms' wages. A one percent increase in FDI presence causes domestic firms to cut average wages by 2.03 percent. The estimations also find that firm-specific features are attributable to significant differences in their wages as well as FDI-linked wage spillovers